End of Wexler

Irving ("Waxey Gordon") Wexler used to be a Bowery pickpocket. From thieving, petty assaults and a stretch in Sing Sing he stepped up into the real estate business. For partners he had a pair of plug-uglies named Max Hassel and Max Greenberg. His real estate business served as a cloak for bigtime bootlegging in New Jersey. By 1931 the Wexler breweries at Paterson and Union City were returning profits at the rate of $2,277,000 per year. 'Legger Wexler bought $10 shirts, rode in limousines, kept an elaborate apartment with three master bedrooms, a library, a living room, a dining room, an American walnut bar, a stained-glass window. He spent $4,200 for leather-bound volumes of Scott. Dickens, Thackeray. Once he paid for a set of Lincoln and Jefferson to give to "a politician." Last April, Plug-uglies Hassel and Greenberg were murdered in a New Jersey hotel. Irving Wexler dried his eyes and went on about his business of being New York's most notorious gangster and beer baron. Last week the Wexler career came to an abrupt and inglorious end in a dingy Federal courtroom in Manhattan.

Last month Irving Wexler was put on trial as an income tax dodger. For three years the U. S. Government had been trying to get him just as it got Chicago's Alphonse Capone. Federal investigators, working day and night, uncovered evidence showing that he owed the Treasury $1,111,000 in taxes. When his trial began bull-necked Irving Wexler affected bored unconcern. Hands laced across his paunch, he dozed while lawyers droned. But spry, boyish Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey soon jolted him wide awake with 140 witnesses and 900 exhibits carefully tracing the history and ramifications of Wexler's beer business. He showed that while Wexler was reporting an income of $8,000 and paying a tax of $10.76. he was living royally off the profits of his breweries, was investing large sums in hotel ventures. By the time Prosecutor Dewey was through with him Wexler was hollow-eyed, limp, twitchy.

On the stand in his own defense Wexler pictured himself as a poor man. He was, he said, only a small cog in a big wheel. His real bosses had been Hassel and Greenberg who gave him a modest allowance, supplied limousines to "keep up the front." He owned no breweries, knew little about the beer racket, and nothing at all about New York gang murders. When Prosecutor Dewey called his testimony a lie, Wexler wept.

It took the jury just 51 minutes to sweep Wexler's story into the discard, bring in a verdict of guilty on all counts. Wexler's jaw sagged and he gulped hard as the judge fined him $80,000, sentenced him to ten years.

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